Friday Five: What I'm Not Doing For Christmas This Year

The RevGalBlogPals Friday Five poses a very simple challenge this week: What five things  am I not doing for Christmas this year?

1. This is a biggie; it's huge: I am not baking Christmas cookies this year. Between preparations for our holiday trip to New York and our other commitments, we just don't have time for our usual full-tilt-boogie cookie-making operation. I told Fellow Traveler that my resolution was not very strong and that she might have to stage an intervention if she saw me rooting around in the cupboards for cookie cutters. Knowing that this is going to disappoint our extended family a great deal -- we literally ship pounds of cookies every year around the country -- we're thinking of hitting a couple of local cookie walks and obtaining some mercy canisters, at least for The Kids.

2. We are not going to attend/assist at Christmas services at our church -- again because of our trip to Gotham to visit the new grandbaby, who presumably will have been born by then. (She is a week late, and her parents are angsting because they're about to lose their reserved berth -- pardon the pun -- at the nice, wholistic-like birthing center where they'd wanted to have the baby.)  I've never spent a Christmas away from home before; it will be interesting. I did some research on churches in the immediate area of The Kids' Brooklyn apartment, and there's an ELCA congregation more or less around the corner -- one with a significant Chinese parishoner base. So we might be hearing the Christmas story in Mandarin on Christmas Eve. That's okay; part of the big-city experience.

3. I am not stressing over gifts this Christmas. We seriously dialed back on our Christmas buying this year, not only because of our trip but because we wanted to channel our gift-giving to people in need We really don't need anything; as far as that goes we've been trying to divest ourselves of things all year long. We were talking about this the other evening; the things we appreciate most are shared experiences, not stuff.

4. I am not sending out dozens of Christmas cards. I'd be surprised, in fact, if I sent out more than ten -- and those mostly to elder relatives. I'm a little conflicted about this because I myself enjoy Christmas cards (ooh, shiny!), and in our family we always made a big deal about displaying them during the holidays. But they do cause dead trees, clutter and a sense of obligation for recipients, and many people we know actually dislike receiving them. So -- hey -- I'm fine with not sending as many. (We will be sending some to Walter Reed Army Hospital, and probably the VA care facility in Saginaw as well, because we do know the patients there enjoy them, and sometimes don't get very many of them.)

5. I am not participating in any social-obligation faux-festivities. No joyless rounds of office potlucks, regifted candles and insincere organizational holiday blather. And I just can't stop smiling as I type this.

Bonus: For your Advent enjoyment:

A Mid-Michigan Advent, Day 5: Waiting

But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home. -- 1 Peter 3:13

In our little town we have been waiting since the end of August for...our lake.

That's when the local lake, the centerpiece of our community, was drained in order for engineers to work on the old, crumbling city dam.

It was a shock, getting into the car one morning and driving a couple blocks down the street to find a huge muddy hole on either side of the bridge. The jagged ends of long submerged tree stumps poked up through the sludge. Seagulls, herons, egrets and even a family of bald eagles gathered to feast on the easy pickings left in what few streams of water were still flowing across the lake bed. After a couple of days a mighty, eye-stinging stench arose -- which we later found out was being caused by countless dead zebra mussels, those hated foreign invaders of first the Great Lakes and now our inland waters.

Many citizens were annoyed that this project began just before Labor Day, especially because our lake is a big draw for sport fishing. But the dam needed to be fixed, and the city had the funds to do it, so people sighed and shrugged and went about their business.

A month passed. Then another. The odor went away. Many of the birds went away. The lake bed had become dry enough for people to walk on parts of it, and local officials encouraged lakeshore property owners and concerned others to venture out onto the mud and pick up trash that had been discarded in the lake over the years -- cans; glass; fishing gear. One citizen even found an old half-buried canoe near his home.

 Everytime we drove over the bridge, we'd look to see if the water was beginning to rise again; but all we saw were the mud flats, criss-crossed by shallow ditches.

We heard that the dam was due to be finished in November. But November came and went, and there was still no water.

The latest news, according to the local paper, is that the dam project is 90 percent completed. The engineers involved promise not only a safer dam but a better, cleaner environment for fish.

That's good news. But it's still jarring, and disappointing,  to look out on the incongruous sea of mud next to our city park all decked out for the holidays.

Sometimes that's how it feels looking at the world, at the news, and waiting for a time when righteousness is at home.

Our Advent Bling

Crowning and Croning

As my Facebook friends know, our cell phones at the ready here as we wait for our granddaughter to make her grand entrance into the world. We talked to a weary Mom-to-Be today, who is more than ready for the big event...especially since her midwife had assured here that it was going to happen this past weekend.

So it's a little ironic that as nature keeps her waiting for motherhood, nature is also keeping me waiting for, as my doctor puts it, "that special time in life."

I am in perimenopause. And as the fertile stage in my life winds down, my reproductive system has started acting like a vehicle hitting 100,000 miles on the odometer -- the timing has gone wonky; the gaskets leak sporadically; the fuel injector misfires. Something like that.

This process started, in fact, a few years ago. The first time I had issues serious enoough to make an appointment with a gyno, I was terrified that I was in the latter stages of a horrible cancer that had somehow escaped notice during my annual exam. The second time I was concerned but not terrified. (Especially when a sympathetic coworker, hearing my tale of woe, said, "Oh, honey, I was that way for three years, until I had the ol' zip-zip.")  The third time, I sighed and thought, "Not this again." The fourth time..."Let's just get it over with."

I'm ready to be a crone. I really am. I've been dancing my hormonal cha-cha since 1972, and I'm tired. I don't want to prolong my youth pharmaceutically; I don't want to go through an expensive invasive procedure to make the annoying perimenopausal symptoms go away. I just want the whole thing to stop. My hair is already gray; I already take my calcium supplements; I'm halfway there.

Crones are cool.

A Mid-Michigan Advent, Day 4: Patience

The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. -- 2 Peter 3:9

My gardening enterprise has been a challenge this year. My new vegetable garden is at the edge of the trees that separate our property from the neighbors' on the west side. Half the plot gets less than optimum light for hot-weather summer vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers. The sunny side of the garden is, alas, also the lowest part of the garden, and if we have a hard rain both the garden itself and the surrounding lawn are sodden for at least a day. The soil is so naturally acid that even after regular applications of lime I still had to fight new flushes of moss creeping onto the cultivated soil. My garden compost pile -- the small-scale nutrient factory that I've nurtured according to expert advice, that is supposed to provide me with regular batches of rich, dark soil amendment -- is functional but slower than I'd hoped. One online resource advised that it might take two years for one year of kitchen refuse and dry organic matter to fully compost in such a system.

I'm not the most patient person in the world. I'm also not the most forbearing of persons. I have abandoned more projects midway through than I care to count.

But I have, for whatever reason, a heart for my garden.

Earlier this fall, when I cleaned up the last of the summer vegetables, I raked in another application of lime. I made a raised bed for garlic; the first of a series of 5-inch raised beds that I'm going to dig within the present perimeter. After planting my garlic bed I raked natural fertilizers into the rest of the garden, and planted a green manure crop of white clover over the whole thing, and in all the other fall-cleared beds around the house.

Because I think I can make something of this. I really do. I am okay with this year being a building year. Next year I will be a bit more mindful about liming and fertilizing, about planting the right plants in the right places, about tending them more faithfully.

The epistle lesson in today's Morning Prayer can be read as a baleful, wait-until-your-father-gets-home eschatological red alert. That's how I read it at first. But then I started thinking instead of God's patience and forbearance; how God, unlike me most of the time, can wait for a positive, fruitful response from God's creation, "not wanting any to perish."

Virtual Advent Retreat

It's at the RevGalBlogPals. Very nicely done.

The Mystery of the Hidden Advent Wreath

Our new, cloth Advent calendar from Bronner's is on our wall, and we've been taking some childlike delight in velcro-ing the first two objects onto their appropriate spots...but our Advent wreath is AWOL.

It's actually down in our crawlspace, somewhere amid our other numerous Christmas boxes. Because we wont' be home on Christmas itself, we're still debating how much, if any, of the Christmas bling to put up; but we did really want to use our Advent wreath this year as a helpful daily reality check this especially busy season.

We have, as our furnace man recently noted, one of the nicest, best-lit, cleanest crawlspaces around...but it still necessitates a real crawl, since there's only about a four-foot clearance. I find something penitential in shuffling around on my knees on the cold cement, getting clear about wants versus needs as I survey our seasonal stuff collection.

Don't Worry 'Bout a Thing...

How serendipitous of me to find this on YouTube a few minutes ago...

A Mid-Michigan Advent, Day 3: Finding Refuge

But all who take refuge in you will be glad; they will sing out their joy for ever. You will shelter them, so that those who love your Name may exult in you. -- Psalm 5:13-14

We had our first stay-on-the-ground snow last night, just enough to dust the property, and today our bird feeders were a flurry of activity as chickadees, nuthatches and woodpeckers came to stock up on our offerings of suet and oil seeds. (In the interest of full disclosure, the lovely photo to your right is not of our suet feeder, although it could be; thanks to the anonymous Flickr patron who took this picture.)
 
One of my responsibilities in this household is care and feeding of the birds -- something I've done since I was little. Both sides of my family, in fact, have always fed and housed backyard songbirds. Fellow Traveler is a city kid who admits to having little knowledge of or experience with birds; but she enjoys their presence too, and helps as needed with this task.
 
Over the past couple of years our once rather strangely quiet backyard has become a local meeting spot for familiar suburban species -- chickadees and titmice; sparrows; assorted woodpeckers; goldfinches; nuthatches; a skittish pair of cardinals. Every so often we're visited by something a bit more dramatic, like the local flock of turkeys. The birds enjoy our proffered foods, and also the assortment of shrubs around our house that provide them with an extra bit of shelter from weather and predators. (Mollie the cat, who spends more of the daytime time indoors than out, will catch birds if an opportunity arises but much prefers furred to feathered quarry.)
 
Providing our winged neighbors hospitality and temporary respite from the vicissitudes of life in the wild is for us, as the saying goes, a duty and a delight, particularly when we see evidence of rapprochement with our little friends. I notice that when I venture outside and come near the feeder, a chickadee will often appear out of nowhere, hop onto a branch very near to me and cock an inquiring eye in my direction: Dee-dee-dee? "What's up? Got anything new to eat?" When one of our normally shy cardinals starts fluttering and chirping directly in front of the living-room window, it's a very good indication that our seed feeder is empty.
 
Sometimes in the Church we get nervous when laypeople seem to think of the Church primarily as a place of refuge from the vicissitudes of life; they want to sing "Safe in the Arms of Jesus," and we immediately want to correct them with "They Cast Their Nets."  But life is hard; and we need one another; and it's a good thing when we can provide a space for peace and restoration for one another.
 
 
 

A Mid-Michigan Advent, Day 2: "Oh, That We Might See Better Times!"

Many are saying,

"Oh, that we might see better times!"
Lift up the light of your countenance upon us, O LORD. -- Psalm 4:6

When I was a kid, the closest thing we had to Coney Island was Houghton Lake, a resort town about 30 miles north of my hometown. The actual lake for which the community is named has the distinction of being Michigan's largest inland lake; but most of the lakeshore has long been obscured by a colorful jumble of motels, vacation rentals and tourist-oriented businesses.

Houghton Lake never possessed the tony cachet of the Traverse Bay area; but for many years it was where a blue-collar worker could buy a weekend getaway cottage for a reasonable price and eventually upgrade it into a cozy retirement home. If you were a child, the town itself offered an inviting assortment of amusements -- go-karts and a summer-long midway, miniature golf, souvenir shops, burger joints. A variety of year-round businesses also made Houghton Lake a shopping destination for residents of smaller nearby towns.

We drove to Houghton Lake today; partly to look for some supplies at a large art-and-craft store, but partly just for the drive. It was a sobering journey, and a reminder that change is the only constant. We drove past formerly unbroken stretches of state forest land now clearcut in large patches, to arrive in a community blasted by a changing economy. Building after building was boarded up; scores of shabby cottages sported For Sale signs on their patchy front yards. Riding down the main drag reminded me of riding through blighted Detroit. The people we saw were mostly old; mostly poor.

I remember once opining that the best thing that could happen to the main street of this community would be a team of bulldozers. That may indeed happen sooner rather than later; in the meantime, neglect and vandalism are already taking their toll.

"Oh, that we might see better times!"

I felt sad as we left for the trip home. I remembered how my father had loved this area and had seriously considered retiring there. I remembered stories of my uncles, in their late teens, spending an enjoyable idyll as hunting and fishing guides there, back in the prewar days when Roscommon County was a destination for affluent downstate and out-of-state sportsmen. I remembered picking berries in the state forest; fishing with my dad in the backwaters of the big lake; lobbying for frozen custards and ferris wheel rides in town.

We were passing the clearcut area again. I looked at one of the older clearcut patches, where young jackpines and other trees had begun to fill the landscape again. This cheered me a little. The very endangered Kirtland's warbler, a tiny bird whose range is limited to the jackpine ecosystem of northern Michigan and an equally tiny area in the Bahamas, requires large stands of young jackpines for nesting. At least a few species are on the ascendancy here.

That's the thing about "better times": Sometimes they involve pain, dislocation, loss; sometimes that's the only way to make room for something new to take place. My part of the world has seen the low side of the boom-and-bust circle before. I want to believe that this latest end of one era is necessary to make room for the next.

A Mid-Michigan Advent, Day 1: Be Alert

(Running a day behind...)

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” - Luke 21:34-36.

We were coming home from a day out of town this Saturday, happy to be approaching our town as the daylight rapidly disappeared. We passed a series of farm fields, now barren and ready for winter, that line the highway; as we did, we noticed a subtle but steady movement along the treeline on the far side of the field. It was a string of deer, slowly making their way along the edge of the field. Their color matched that of the bare earth and corn stubble and dry weeds around them; they were barely visible. Every so often one of them would stop the group's resolute trek to lift up its head and scan its surroundings.

I felt pity for the deer, this last weekend of the firearm deer season. I was aware, from my daylight trips down this highway, how many hunters' stands and shanties lay hidden in the trees. I suspected that more than one member of the herd had fallen to a hunter's bullet in the past days. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a deer this time of year, experiencing the sudden terror of the rifle's blast, the smell of gunpowder and blood, and the running, the breathless running for one's life, into the next field for a few minutes' respite...only to have the terror repeat again, and again, and again.

Those of you reading this, like myself, don't live with the day-to-day terror that our four-legged neighbors face. But many people on this planet do, in places beset by war or disease or natural disaster. And even in the relative comfort of 21st century America, there's a sense these days that our privilege has come to an end; like the deer, we are finding that we can't simply run from our present economic or societal woes into some quiet, verdant next-door pasture. That's how it feels here in mid-Michigan, right now. And as the text in Luke suggests, some of us here in depressed rural America are sedating ourselves with drugs to take the edge off our lives, while others of us live with ongoing gnawing anxiety that eats away at our physical and mental health, shortens our tempers and prompts us to circle the wagons around what's left -- our possessions, our affiliations, our ideologies.

So is there a good word at all in Sunday's Gospel lesson?  I think it's the same message I saw in the lives of the deer. You carry on, for your own sake and for that of the people around you. You live prudently. You keep moving when you can. You pray -- which I think deer do by being themselves, and which we do in part by being ourselves, truly ourselves, and offering that to God. And maybe some day -- some day -- we will find ourselves in a place with no more pain, no more anxiety, no more confusion, standing before the Son of Man.

Redemption Songs

I have no idea what's getting played over on the local Christian radio station today, but I heard this song on Sirius Coffeehouse a few minutes ago and thought it rather appropriate for this beginning of the Advent season:

A "Crushed" Friday Five

From the RevGalBlogPals this week:

...in high school, I had a crush on my Chorus teacher. He was a young guy, and he had gone to college with some cousins of mine, and over the summer between 9th and 10th grade, we ran into each other at a series of pre-wedding parties, and I feel DEEPLY in like.

You?

1) Did you ever have a crush on a teacher?
My first first-grade teacher, Mrs. Peters. After a Kindergarten in Hell where I was traumatized by an irascible old relic from normal-school days who had finally begun to melt down in the thick of the Baby Boom, Mrs. Peters was my savior: She treated me with kindness and respect; she actually encouraged my intelligence and curiosity -- unlike my kindergarten teacher, who treated me like an annoying problem; she let me do special tasks for her like help decorate the class bulletin boards at recess instead of going outside. And unlike the rest of the faculty -- the sort of Sensible Women who wore orthopedic shoes and their hair in buns -- Mrs. Peters was hip, with a "That Girl" flip and mod clothing. When circumstances caused our elementary school to add a new first-grade teacher to the roster and shift the original classes around, I found myself in a new classroom, with a dispositional clone of my ogre-like kindergarten teacher, and I was distraught for the rest of the year.

2) Who was your first crush?
I had a boy crush on a little kindergarten classmate.busmate of mine, Ronnie, who bore a close resemblence to a baby seal or a Precious Moments figurine; he had the biggest blue eyes and longest eyelashes of anyone I'd ever seen. He was a tiny, slight boy who was constantly picked on by the bigger kids, and that brought out my protective instincts. I remember Ronnie being tormented one day on the bus ride home by some older students, and that angering me so much that I -- and I too was often the brunt of teasing and unkindness on the bus -- stood up, waved an accusatory finger at the older kids and told them that they'd better leave Ronnie alone. I was loud enough to attract the attention of the bus driver, who finished the job of reprimanding the bus bullies. This of course did not win me any friends among the cool kids, but Ronnie was grateful, and even gave me a kiss on the playground at one point.

3) Have you ever given a gift to a crush?
Just my current crush, who also happens to be my partner.

4) Do you have a celebrity crush? (Around my house we call them TV boyfriends and girlfriends...)
The fact that Fellow Traveler and I have been discussing this for five minutes and are unable to come up with names or faces is probably an indicator that I don't. Now, I used to have an auditory crush on Fiona Ritchie's voice -- she the Scottish hostess of The Thistle and Shamrock. And both Fellow Traveler and I are rather taken with Geoffrey, Ina Garten's amiable, beloved and amazingly well fed husband.

5) Have you ever been surprised to find yourself the crushee?
One evening when I was a freshman in college, walking back to the dorm for supper after a late class, I was startled to find a male classmate sidling up next to me. He was someone who I had, in my mind, voted Most Likely to Ascend the Clock Tower and Start Shooting Random Bystanders With An Assault Rifle. ("He was really quiet..." "He always kept to himself...")  I remember noticing, of all things, his hands in class -- he had short, fat hands like a garden toad's front claws, and I remember being disturbed by that, and by the way he stared at me and other students when we engaged in class discussions. Anyway, Fat Hands started talking to me, innocuous stuff out of the "How to Start a Conversation With a Girl" handbook, and even though I was quite curt and unencouraging in my responses he followed me all the way home to my "island" of dormitories. I decided to eat in the cafeteria of the dorm next to mine, so he wouldn't figure out where I actually lived. He followed right behind me in line, and sat across from me, and kept trying to engage in conversation with me. I finally lied; told him that I had a date with my boyfriend and couldn't talk to him anymore. Despite this, he got up when I did and was ready to follow me to this date until I finally told him that, no, he needed to go home now, or my boyfriend would be angry. He finally took the hint and left...and to my relief, he never attempted talking to me or walking with me or anything else ever again. I always felt that my guardian angel was working overtime that particular evening. But the experience left me very afraid for weeks afterward.

Thinking back on this bizarre incident, I'm astounded at how passive I was and how afraid to hurt this guy's feelings. My God, it's no wonder that so many university students wind up victims of sexual assault. If something similar happened to me today, I think it's safe to say that things would be handled...um... differently.

Whaaaat?

A bit of irony for breakfast: We're doing some catalog Christmas shopping for the extended fam this morning. Fellow Traveler just noted that the Cabela's catalog is offering an Alaskan fly-in Dall sheep hunting excursion for $15,000. I slipped over to the Heifer Project catalog, where purchasing a sheep, plus all the attendant training in husbandry, marketing and such, for a family in the developing world costs $120.

Stephen Colbert Tries Liturgical Dance

Christ the King Sunday

I posted this video on our church website...pretty cool:

Friday Five: Aunt Bert's Thanksgiving

From the RevGalBlogPals:

The Cure

Lying around all day
with some strange new deep blue
weekend funk, I'm not really asleep
when my sister calls
to say she's just hung up
from talking with Aunt Bertha
who is 89 and ill but managing
to take care of Uncle Frank
who is completely bed ridden.
Aunt Bert says
it's snowing there in Arkansas,
on Catfish Lane, and she hasn't been
able to walk out to their mailbox.
She's been suffering
from a bad case of the mulleygrubs.
The cure for the mulleygrubs,
she tells my sister,
is to get up and bake a cake.
If that doesn't do it, put on a red dress.

-- Ginger Andrews (from Hurricane Sisters)



So this Friday before Thanksgiving, think about Aunt Bert and how she'll celebrate Thanksgiving! And how about YOU?


1. What is your cure for the "mulleygrubs"?
A ride in the country often does it for me.

2. Where will you be for Thanksgiving?
I will be at home with my beloved, sans guests -- for the first time in three years. Usually we invite some of our family-disconnected friends to be with us for the holiday. This year we originally thought we'd be in Brooklyn with Son #2, Almost-Daughter-in-Law and Almost Grandchild...but we're now going there for Christmas, so we declared that this Thanksgiving would be our time together.

3. What foods will be served? Which are traditional for your family?
We are, like the Baywatch producers cited on Glee the other week, going in a different direction this year: We ordered a turducken from Cajun Grocers, and will be attempting some Cajun and Creole side dishes to go with it, as well as a sweet potato/praline pie. None of this is in any way traditional for our family. One day we were watching the Food Network, and idly wondered what a turducken might taste like, and one thing led to another.

4. How do you feel about Thanksgiving as a holiday?
I loved Thanksgiving as a small child and have fallen in love with it again since I don't have to deal with the extended-family stress that would send my mother into an emotional tailspin each fall. I like the univeral nature of it; that it's grown beyond its sectarian roots so that everyone from New England Congregationalists to emigre' Senegalese cabbies can embrace it as their holiday.

5. In this season of Thanksgiving, what are you grateful for?
I am grateful for my beloved Fellow Traveler; for my new extended family, which will soon (as in any day now) include a new grandbaby; for our own cozy Thanksgiving this year; for a life away from my former place of employment (something I still thank God for every day); for my church family; for our Amish friends and neighbors and the cultural texture they bring to our community; for our ability to travel and pursue our own interests, and for my increasingly infrequent tendency to feel guilty for this or unworthy of the privilege.

BONUS: Describe Aunt Bert's Thanksgiving.
I've never been to Arkansas, but if Aunt Bert and Uncle Frank were part of my church family I suspect that they'd be showered with holiday cards right now, and that on Thanksgiving they'd respond to a knock on the door to find their neighbors offering them a complete Thanksgiving feast with extras for the weekend...and that Aunt Bert, having met them at the door with her red dress on, would invite them in for some just-baked cake.

A Lutheran Eavesdropping On Calvinists Doing Theology

With apologies to all my friends and readers in the greater Reformed tradition...after reading this , all I've got to say is: My head hurts.

Christian Bullies and Klingon Love

I received this update, again, from yet another former high-school classmate on Facebook:

Let's see how many people on fb aren't ashamed to show their love for God and admit that Jesus is their Savior... We need to get God back in America... If you're not ashamed, copy and paste this in your status!

Apart from the fact that this spam keeps recirculating back onto my Facebook page, sent by people considerably older than the 12-year-old who appears to have originally written it...what really frosts me about this childish conflation of jingoism and kindergarten evangelism is the mocking, confrontational tone: If you're not ashamed...

What if I don't copy and paste? Do I go to hell then? Do you unfriend me because I must be a heathen? Oooooh...I'm so scaaaaared.

What is this thing about a certain subset of conservative Christians and their need to throw down the gauntlet in front of every other Christian they encounter, challenging them to "prove" how Really Christian[tm] they are?

It's kind of like rutting Klingons in Star Trek -- how, before they do the one thing, they beat one another up.

Well, sorry, Real Christians[tm], but I don't swing that way.  And I'm not a Christianity Cop; if someone tells me s/he's a friend of Jesus I tend to take that person at his or her word  -- even a nutty and/or annoying person --  until I'm given good reason to suspect otherwise. And may I point out that, whether someone is a friend of Jesus or not at any given moment, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

Glory Be To God For Dappled Things

This afternoon we decided to take the Gertster on a ride -- this is how we justify taking rides. As we usually do on such journeys, we visited a couple of our Amish neighbors' roadside stands -- soon coming to the end of the season -- to see what produce they might still have for sale. We were specifically looking for Delicata squash, a small striped winter variety that's easy to prepare even in the microwave, fine-fleshed and candy-sweet.

We were in luck -- there were still a few Delicata  available. There were also some wonderful confetti-colored acorn squash. "I have to try one of those," I announced. (I found out later that this particular variety is called Carnival.)

One of my many garden eccentricities is a fascination with anything unusual for its type. (Fellow Traveler says that this is part of the "Ooh, Shiny!" Syndrome.) Why grow green snap beans if you can grow striped chartreuse-and-purple snap beans? Why not candy-stripe beets, or golden beets, instead of the old Detroit beets that my parents grew every year? Round orange pumpkins are a dime a dozen; what about the elegant red-gold French heirloom pumpkins instead?

Obviously I'm a GMO developer's dream consumer, which is why it's a good thing that I'm also an organo-locovoric type who shuns such products whenever I can identify them, on principle. (And usually loudly, in the store -- as in, "Oh, look! Here's some Acme Corn Critters made with genetically manipulated corn!") If my squash is tri-colored, I want it to be because its ancestors were cross-bred with lovely multihued heritage varieties, not because a mad scientist in a multinational agribusiness added some calico-kitty DNA to his witch's brew of Frankensquash.

And some of these veggies don't just have a pretty face. Chioggia beets, with their candy-cane interiors, are wonderfully flavored, as are the purple-striped Dragon Langerie snap beans. One of our great discoveries this summer was the Black Russian variety of tomato, which beat out all competitors in my BLT taste test. Other unusual veggies are -- well -- meh; all hat and no cattle. But that's okay too.

I'm going to continue my love affair with dappled things in next year's garden...and expand that category to include the "Miscellaneous" section of seed catalog offerings.  After all, we can get a lot of very nice veggies from our Amish friends; but try finding salsify or Florence fennel around here. FT is chuckling over my current moodling over sketches of our garden plot -- which will be divided into raised beds in the spring -- trying to decide the most advantageous spots to plant this motley assortment.

Frankenfood: no. A garden of earthly delights to the eye as well as the palate: oh, yes.